"Early Access" feedback - extended version

I've been taking notes since "EA" started, and I think I'm now at the point where I feel comfortable sharing everything.

NB - Until ~10 years ago, I was a Senior Dev for a major company in the Gambling Industry (which has to take things seriously because of compliance reasons), and have over 20k hours in PoE1 - that's why I will mention some aspects of SDLC (Software Development LifeCycle).

- First off: why "Early Access" with quotes?
Early Access would be a name suitable for something that has been tested. And with a list the size of what I am about to explain, it's more of a Late Testing. I feel like everyone playing "EA" has paid to be a Beta Tester. (I mean, not everyone paid, but most did)

- no Death Log
This has been asked for a long time now. GGG clearly has ignored, is ignoring, and will keep ignoring this playerbase request. The "WTF killed me"? has become a meme for some time now, and it will only get worse.

- Ascendancy scammers are going rampant (and becoming rich)
The Ascendancy trials are 1) boring AF, 2) crap for melee, 3) crap for everyone else, as a player might "get lucky" on the types of trials, or not. Mostly not.
It's too long, too random, and has become a chore many players do not want to do. This created an opportunity for scammers, who keep posting on Trade, and if you prepay, they will just kick you and ignore you.
If I wanted to be scammed knowing that a game was filled with scammers, I would go back to Eve Online.
I have reported many of them, GGG has done nothing. More on that later.

- I miss Delve
This is just a personal pet peeve of mine. I loved Delve, chilling while getting prime resonators to sell.

- Map drop rate is appalling
It's so appalling, players are selling T15+ maps for ridiculous prices. The alternative is to spend precious Atlas points to ramp up the drops.
As the Atlas right now is so basic, it all becomes a crapfest.

- Typos
The game had so many typos at launch, I have to assume that GGG's process for devs to make changes to the game is extremely insufficient. Any company that builds code needs to have guardrails in place to make sure the code has some minimum quality. As in, seen and approved by at least one person who is not the dev him/herself.
As it seems GGG has some very illiterate devs (which is fine, devs usually say "I'm here to code, not to be Shakespeare") and their codebase changes do not get flagged and corrected before hitting Production.
I might have some typos on this post, but hey, I have only read it twice, and I'm not coding something that will be seen by thousands of users.
As it stands, the whole "EA" looks like a Development or Pre-Production environment, and testing is not being done.
I mean, it's being done by the players (glorified beta testers).

- Not a casual game anymore
I used to love PoE because of my limited play time, and because it was "easy".
Not anymore.
Fine, this is what GGG wants, but alienating what I imagine are a bunch of players does not feel good for the future. And it surely doesn't feel right.

- Still a zoom-zoom
Yes, GGG made the game slow on purpose, but there is still a need to be fast and zoom around as quickly as possible.
Delirium and Breach are two good examples.
From a design standpoint, if you want to remove zoom-zoom, those mechanics would also have to be removed.
Like this, it's a hybrid of very slow and very fast, which is confusing and unappealing (to say the last).

- High-end GPUs struggle
Again, back to code quality - or lack thereof: it's not acceptable for the DirectX12 renderer to be crashing randomly, and player having to resort to scaling back their GPU settings and/or picking another renderer.
It's "just" simple bad code quality, and again, I say: it feels like GGG did not do any proper testing before going ahead with "EA".

- Playerbase engagement
Putting out videos of what GGG is doing is not enough.
This is very top-down and borderline despotism. Community requests are being ignored for many years now in PoE1, and PoE2 is going the same way.

- It's 2024, the AI is pathetic
Minions behave like some NPC from a ZX Spectrum game made in 1988.
With so many ongoing discussions happening in the tech industry about AI, it's clear GGG didn't test (yeah, I'm saying it again) something that should be so obvious, that I wonder how many hours (if any) they played their own game.

- Many players are going back to PoE1
Reddit is full of threads that clearly show this is happening at a larger scale.

- MTX? Tabs?
I have acquired many MTX and tabs over my PoE1 years, out of a mix of need, and desire to support GGG.
But when I saw that many tabs are missing, and 99.9% of the MTX are not in "EA", I really do not feel like ever paying another penny. Cent. Whatever.

- The Fun Brigade
This has become a meme, also.
So many nerfs so early on indicate that GGG has people constantly looking at Youtube videos, and nerfing every single build that looks to be "too easy".
The thing is, "easy", for many players, means "fun".
As such, the Fun Brigade name was born. Imagine some people dressed like the Grinch, scavenging for builds that are genuinely fun, only to be nerfed very fast.
If only they fixed bugs as fast as they nerf players' fun...

- Boss is where?
Maps are slower now.
Which is, from a design standpoint, fine.
However... spending 10 minutes clearing trash mobs just to then know the boss you need to kill is right at the start and you have to crawl all the way back... that is crap game design.
Or sadism. Or both.

- Release flop + no support
Many of us will remember the terrible experience everyone had when "EA" was released. (the others already abandoned the game)
And some others that purchased the "EA" access through Stream will remember how the "no keys" issue was a shock.
Well, I was one of the suckers who bought access through Steam.
It was my son's birthday gift, and then it wasn't real, as Steam access was foobared.
I only had one option - buy the game directly from GGG.
Which I did. Kid is happy, birthday was awesome.
But daddy here paid twice.

GGG support has been ignoring me.
Seriously?
If GGG can't have proper Customer Support for one game, how will they deal with two? Spoiler - they won't.

That's all. For now.